Setting aside the mild controversy regarding the nomenclature confusion surrounding Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch's final feature film was the digitally-shot Inland Empire, a byzantine work somewhat reductively billed as "a mystery about a woman in trouble". This same description could also apply to both Lynch's previous film, Mulholland Drive, and Ashley De Grandy’s debut feature, Regina, a movie for which Inland Empire appears to serve as a key reference point. It feels oddly apt that the tail end of David Lynch's career in cinema provides a template of sorts for a film that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.
On a superficial level, Regina could be distilled to "a woman searching for her cat", as the title character (Isabella Bobadilla) scours the neighbourhood for the moggy she hasn't seen for quite some time. Regina is aided in this quest by her good friend Daisy (Loren Swan), and the pair plaster the streets with posters appealing for the return of the missing pet. So far, so linear, but, as with Inland Empire, Regina eventually reaches a tipping point where the narrative splinters into a cluster of jagged fragments, and Regina, like Laura Dern's Nikki in Lynch's film, finds herself in a terrifying twilight world in which little is recognisable.
Also as with Inland Empire, Regina is a film in which prostitution plays a murky role, and Regina finds herself an unwilling participant in a seedy arrangement presided over by her mother (musician Roxana Frontini). As Regina's life disintegrates further, the hunt for her cat is largely erased from both her and the viewer's memories; while it's not clear if the feline even existed in the first place, it's pretty obvious that the search for it is nothing more than a MacGuffin that sets up the title character's nightmarish ordeal. As reality bends and warps, Ashley De Grandy deftly steers this ambitious film through its choppy, elliptical back half.
With its depiction of the horrors that lie beneath the sun-dappled surface, Regina, which premiered at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, is instantly identifiable as being influenced by the work of David Lynch, yet this is no mere pastiche (in terms of homage, another film that debuted at the same festival, Saturnalia, sailed much closer to the wind as it mimicked the work of Dario Argento). De Grandy has injected enough of her own filmmaking personality into Regina to elevate it beyond an ersatz Lynch, and she's helped by a brave, confident turn from Bobadilla, who glues the film together as Regina's sanity unravels.
Darren Arnold
